Nuts and Bolts can also help the rest of us for whom writing

If you're lucky enough to like to write—if you love "the music the words make," the rhythm and pace of phrases and sentences, the architectural possibilities of paragraphs—you'll find it easy to use this guide, because you're most likely willing to do the hard work required to write well..

But most people don't have such warm feelings about writing. Nuts and Bolts can also help the rest of us for whom writing—especially school writing—has mainly meant drudgery, anxiety, and getting ruthlessly criticized for breaking this or that rule or being "unclear" or "vague" or "wordy," as if we were doing those things on purpose. Studying writing might not seem like fun, but I've tried to make Nuts and Bolts as concise and entertaining as possible, even as it teaches its lessons about the active voice, rhetoric, punctuation, and so on. One promise: if you put in some effort at this, you'll get better as a writer.

I can promise you that if you put in some time studying the arcane secrets of the active voice, parallelism, semicolons, etc., you'll start writing better, you'll enjoy it more—and, to bottom-line it, you'll get better grades.

Most people probably suppose that a writing guide should be a kind of rule-book. Since I see it differently, perhaps Nuts and Bolts should be called a thinking guide rather than a writing guide. As a thinking guide, Nuts and Bolts offers not just a bunch of rules to memorize but a framework for how to analyze essays, from their overall structure down to individual words.
You become a better writer primarily by reflection and analysis (and by writing!) rather than rote memorization. I promise you that if you take the time to look through the guide and pay attention, you'll find scores of useful ways to improve as a writer. You'll understand the process of writing essays better, and you'll take more pride in the work you put into your writing. Hopefully the Nuts and Bolts Guide can kindle in even the most writing-averse student a flicker of Emerson's reverence for the creative magic of writing.